Coleman gains 66 votes in recount
Jason Adkins
DL-Online - 11/28/2008
Becker County's portion of the U.S. Senate recount finished on Wednesday without the hiccups and acrimony that characterized the first two days of the process.
Sen. Norm Coleman ended up gaining 66 net votes in the county by the end.
Coleman's gain is based on an unofficial tally, and does not take into account challenges launched by observers from Coleman's or Al Franken's campaigns.
A nearly 2-to-1 difference in the number of challenges came from Coleman's campaign, which if withdrawn by his side or rejected by the Canvassing Board, would significantly lower that margin.
The count has Coleman at 8,385 votes for the county, while Franken's votes stand at 5,919 and other votes for various candidates sit at 2,640.
After the original count on Nov. 4, Coleman had 8,401 votes and Franken had 6,001.
The gap between Coleman and Franken in Becker County now stands at 2,466 votes, compared to 2,400 votes after the original count.
There were 98 challenges made by Coleman's campaign and 54 by Franken's.
Challenges can't be directly factored into either Coleman's or Franken's totals, because a challenge could mean that one candidate loses a vote, but another candidate may not necessarily gain one to due a ballot cast for a third-party candidate, or overvote/undervote issues.
An overvote is when two or more candidates' boxes were marked in the Senate race, and an undervote is when no candidates were selected.
The end result for both scenarios is that these votes aren't recorded for anyone.
With the high number of challenges in the county, if they are found to be valid, it's tough to tell which candidate will gain the most from the recount.
Those challenges, if not withdrawn by the respective campaigns, will be decided on by the state Canvassing Board starting Dec. 16.
After the large number of ballots lost and found during the first two days of the recount, no ballots came up missing on the Wednesday.
But the challenges continued, especially from the Coleman camp.
His observers challenged 11 ballots on Wednesday, while observers for Franken challenged four ballots.
Despite his team challenging almost as twice as many ballots as Franken's during the course of Becker County recount, Coleman spokesman Mark Drake put the blame in Franken's camp.
"The Franken campaign is getting increasingly desperate and that's why we're seeing such mounting challenges," Drake said. "We were told that there was this great undervote out there for Al Franken in Minneapolis and in St. Louis County.
"Obviously that's not happening, so we're seeing the Franken campaign trying to deflate Sen. Coleman's numbers. They're clearly losing and getting desperate. So that's why we are seeing all of these challenges by them."
The 61 ballots that were not part of the original count on Nov. 4, but were discovered by Becker County Auditor-Treasurer Ryan Tangen's office on Nov. 7, were finally counted on Wednesday.
Fifty-three of the ballots were from mail-in precincts and eight ballots were absentee.
The ballots were spread out over seven precincts, and Tangen had those counted last.
Based on reports from observers from both campaigns, Coleman picked up 33 votes, Franken had 15 more votes and there were 11 votes for other candidates.
While Franken's vote total was less than half of Coleman's, Franken spokeswoman Colleen Murphy said that it's important that the ballots get counted.
"We've said all along that every vote that was validly cast should be counted," Murphy said.
Drake said that he feels good about the recount, especially after Coleman took a majority of the 61 uncounted ballots.
As for the issues with lost and found ballots, and the additional 61 uncounted ballots, Drake said that he knows that mistakes can happen.
"We feel like the process is going as well as it can. Occasionally it will have little hiccups," Drake said. "The county officials as a whole are doing a great job. This process is transparent and fair, and we feel good about where we are."
Franken's observers on-site were directed not to comment on the recount process.
In the end, Tangen said that the ballots he expected to recount and the ballots that were actually recounted matched up.
Those included the 61 uncounted ballots, and missing ballots that were stuck in ballot boxes and transported to the county courthouse during the recount.
There were lessons to be learned from all of the mishaps, and Tangen made notes on what to look for in subsequent elections.
"We're going to take the different situations we've had — I've been writing them down as we went — and look at how we can identify and improve the processes that we currently have in place so that we can avoid this in the future," Tangen said. "It's truly a learning experience.
"And as we move forward, we will certainly try to correct those areas that we feel we could have avoided in these less than ideal situations."
dl-online.com
Senate recount: Franken to withdraw some ballot challenges
By Mike Kaszuba , Star Tribune
Last update: December 1, 2008 - 4:16 PM
With the recount in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race now close to 90 percent complete, Democrat Al Franken's campaign said today it would announce the withdrawal of "more than dozens" of its ballot challenges later this week.
Although both Franken and Republican Sen. Norm Coleman's campaigns have talked of eventually scaling back the thousands of ballot challenges they have made combined, attorney Marc Elias' comments indicated there might be signs of that now actually happening. "It'll be more than dozens," Elias told reporters during an afternoon conference call.
Elias also said that critics were reading too much into comments that Franken's campaign has made regarding whether it would ask the U.S. Senate ultimately to decide the election. "We've made no decisions of where we go," Elias said, referring to Franken's options should he lose the recount. "Obviously, the Senate remains an option."
Coleman spokesman Mark Drake downplayed the significance of the announcement about the withdrawal of challenges, saying that simply dropping dozens of them "doesn't seem like too much of a dent." Drake said Coleman's campaign had offered to meet with Franken's attorneys on the issue. He also said he did not know whether the Coleman campaign would likewise independently withdraw challenges as early as this week.
Challenged ballots are those on which one side or the other disputes a recount official's decision, and they will go to the state Canvassing Board for a final call. With the number of such ballots exceeding 5,600 last week and each side accusing the other of making unwarranted challenges, the board asked both campaigns to cut down their totals.
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